Bring Your Own Hammer is not a band, a group, an ensemble or even a collective. If anything, it is a faction but unlike nineteenth-century factions, who met, armed with sticks and two-handed wattles in fairs and markets, it is armed with voices and instruments and dedicated, as no faction before, to the re-interpretation of historical material in song form. Our first album, My Grief on the Sea, is brimming with superb contributions from leading Irish and international composers, musicians and singers including Agu, Linda Buckley, Cathal Coughlan, Adrian Crowley, Neil Farrell, Eileen Gogan, Tony Higgins, Carol Keogh, Michelle O’Rourke, Wally Nkikita, Brigid Mae Power, Michael J Sheehy, Mike Smalle and Jah Wobble. The album offers a collection of songs about the sea, sea journeys and migration to and from Ireland in the nineteenth century. You are invited to journey with us as we criss-cross the Atlantic world following the remaining threads of lives shaped, in one way or another, by the sea.